Life is a Fight (Part 2): The Fight to Embrace Joy

Well, here we are again, this is Dick Boath, with stories to make sense of it all. Last week, we had a podcast with my friend Kirk Foster and his wonderful wife, Leah. Airborne Ranger, United States Army, deployed, I think, 20 times over these last years. I've known him since he was 23, he's now 37. Right now with three children, and we were talking about life as a fight. It is a journey, but life is also a fight. And he being uniform military just wanted to honor and be grateful for the folks who have allowed us the privilege of being able to do podcasts like this without fear of reprisal. So that was last week. This week, I wanted to talk to his mom. She was in the room at the time we did last week's podcast and the interview with Kirk and Leah, and her name is Elaine Foster. When I think of moms, I automatically go to my own, of course, who passed away a number of years ago at the age of 100. And she was a feisty lady, a good lady. Elaine Foster is cut of that same cloth. Well, when I think biblically of a mother, one of the persons that I go to most readily is Mary, the mother of Jesus. And there's a very interesting, she was mom, you know, in her teen years probably. And there's a very interesting story and account of Mary and Joseph taking Jesus for Passover up from Nazareth to Jerusalem, whole village. I'm sure was going tens of thousands of people are there in the city. He's 12 years old and they lose him. You know, I don't blame them really. I don't think it's too tough to lose a 12 year old in a very interesting place. But they didn't realize they had lost him for a couple of days until they were on their way home and they went back and found him. And this was the account. This is found in Luke's Gospel, verse 43, after the festival is over while his parents were returning home. The boy Jesus stayed behind in Jerusalem, but they were unaware of it. Thinking he was in their company, they traveled on for a day. Then they began looking for him among their relatives and friends. When they did not find him, they went back to Jerusalem to look for him. After three days, they found him in the temple court sitting among the teachers listening to them and asking them questions. You say, why did it take three days? This is both. Why did it take three days? Well, you know, you're looking for him down by the creek. You're looking for him if they had anything like a soccer field, but not the temple, but there he is. Everyone who heard him was amazed because after three days, they found him in the temple court sitting among the teachers listening to them and asking them questions. When his parents saw him, they were astonished. His mother said to him, and you can create your own tone for this if you're a mom. Son, why have you treated us like this? Your father and I have been anxiously searching for you. Why are you searching for me? Yes. Didn't you know I had to be in my father's house, capital F, but they did not understand what he was saying to them. And he went down to Nazareth with them and was obedient to them. But his mother treasured all these things in her heart. And Jesus grew in wisdom and stature and in favor with God and man. Moms ponder a lot of things in their heart. Moms think about us children in ways that probably we fathers don't think about them. And it's that intensity and that intimate nurturing that really is a profound thing. So last week I spoke to two warriors as I put it, both Kirk who went literally into battle and Leah who stayed at home with her own fights to fight and fight through some things. And then there's the mom who also was a warrior in her own right. And I say that not just because she is a mother by gifting, but in her professional life, she is a teacher by calling. She teaches little people. And I want to start there. I asked Elaine, when did you know you were a teacher or wanted to be? When I was in second grade I wanted to be a teacher because my teacher at that time was not very nice and I thought, well, I want to be a nice teacher. So then by the time I was in eighth grade I was teaching two year olds in Sunday school and then I went to university to get my teaching degree and I got done as quickly there as I could because that wasn't where I wanted to be. I wanted to be in my own classroom. So let me just jump in here. So here's G.I. Joe over here who knows he wants to be a soldier when he's a kid. Now you know you want to be a teacher when you're, maybe it's in the DNA. You decide early because we have lots of people who as the common phrases who have failed you to launch in these days because they have so many options, so many opportunities. But you knew early. I knew early. And it wasn't because you had a great teacher. No. Because you had a bad teacher. Well, that's an interesting approach. And I hear what you're saying because I've heard that over and over. Very few people know at a young age and then continue to pursue that until they're older and actually follow that dream, if you will, of becoming that person that you want it to be. So yeah, it doesn't happen very often. But I was one of the few and then when I did get into teaching I taught a couple of years before we started having our family. Then when we had our family I stepped away for a little bit and then I started going back part-time even when our kids were little just to kind of keep my foot in the door and kept my teaching license current, taking the classes I needed to every five years to keep my license current. And then gradually worked back into it more and more as the kids got older so that by the time they were all gone I was back to teaching full-time. So what age levels generally did you teach? So I've taught preschool, so pre-K, I've taught gifted and talented kindergarten through sixth grade and I've taught classroom, second, third and fourth. Do you have favorite? I like it all, obviously. I like it all. Sweet spot for you. I think third grade is just- That's when they used to teach cursive. Oh, I love teaching. Do we still teach cursive where you are? In second grade now. Second grade. A lot of places don't teach cursive. No, because- And as I tried to explain to parents the reason we still teach cursive is so that you have a signature. I was going to say we're going to go back to the big X and little X. Well, and someday you don't really need to have a signature when you sign with your finger, it doesn't really matter what it looks like. So there's a sense in which educators, such as yourself, you are teaching their hopefully learning, you're doing all these creative things so they can have a range in their lives and grow and be productive citizens and all of that. But there's a very real sense in which you, like your son, have to be a fighter. Here's my question. When you're in the classroom, what is it that you're fighting for? That is so hard. Because you want the kids to have a joy for learning and for being alive and sometimes that's taken away from them because of circumstances surrounding their lives and the schools. And so to be able to continue having that love and joy and laughter and desire to be there in the classroom, that's what we're fighting for. That they want to be there, they want to learn, they want to find out new and different things, not just on the internet, not just because of what's happening in their lives, but because it's fun and there's so much to learn and explore. And so as a teacher, I'm fighting for that joy to be in the classroom all the time. That statement is fascinating to me. But here's a teacher and many teachers, I'm sure are like this, that they want joy of learning and with learning through learning to be the end point of the goal and the motivation for why we want to learn. I got to tell you, I had some teachers along the way that I don't think I'm not sure they had much joy because they weren't bringing much to me. And I just was struck by that and I'd like to parenthetically just drop another little chat in here and I'll come back to Elaine in just a moment. But I have a friend, Bart Melby, who's four several decades been an early childhood teacher here in Northern Colorado. And I just called her up and said, talk to me about what's going on in that little person's brain. And she talked just for a few moments with me about that and described how when parents and teachers encourage little people, it ignites certain things in them. Here it is. Just igniting them, some of these exciting things that come with thing independent. So some of the first ones are just their experiences with trust as they go on to their own world and with their peers who can I trust, what can I trust in for, and love. Do people love me? Do they like me? Do I like myself? Do I like other people? And how do I go about expressing that? Do I learn to express kindness? Can I express empathy with kids who are in need? How do I express anger in an appropriate way? All those things really take off during this preschool experience, this age of three to five. They also learn what their world looks like through their own filters, not necessarily to their parents or their caregivers. So they learn what can I do with my world? How do I experiment with things? How do I problem-solve, expanding your imagination, living in fantasy worlds with play? So when I'm in that classroom, as a little person with Barbie or a little later with a lane foster and you bring up play, I'm all over that. You know, I think play is one of God's great gifts to the human race and Barbie expanded on that. Play is so important to develop these things because it gives them an opportunity each day to try things out to see what happens, to expand even the physical things they're learning how to do. They learn to do those with peers, they learn to do it with caregivers, and then they learn to do it by themselves. Kids throughout all of their education experience obviously have very important teachers and then teachers who may not impact them quite as much. But even you talk to a lot of middle school and elementary, I mean in high school kids and they'll talk to you about their favorite coach and their favorite teacher. Having someone to expand a world for them means that they might have a greater experience with those things. And I think expanding a world for a three to five-year-old is limitless because they are just starting out and this is their first experience at it. One of my favorite quotes is from Albert Einstein, it says, imagination is more important to knowledge because imagination has no limits. And in that age, they know how to do that. Their brains are developing, they're doing a lot of physical coordination developing. So all those things are laid upon that foundation of self-confidence, their own delight in learning, their excitement about seeing new things happen. All those things that they're opened up to them, encourage them to have a greater imagination, to actually develop skills that will be their reading and their math and their science skills. They're going to have a lot of problems, things like that, if that's a joy to them, then they're, you know, sky's a limit. There's that joy word again. Teachers, like Elaine Foster and Barbell, are bringers of joy. Joy seems to be the operative word that set of wings that allows the sky to be the limit. I had another conversation and again, we live in a time when our nation is convulsing at certain levels and for significant reasons. And I'm trying to get my mind around that, much like you might be. But I talk to a friend who lives in Washington, DC and she's a professor. So she's not early childhood. She's up in graduate education. She's been teaching law at the University of Virginia and she is now the dean elect if I can use it that way. As of August 1st, she will be the dean at George Washington University Law School. Her name is Dana Matthew and she is the first female dean of the law school and she's the first African American dean of the law school. She has a wonderful heart for children and a wonderful heart for people having access to learning. I would submit that she would make a case for accessing joy and this is how she talked to me about it just a couple of days ago. What we are able to provide for children in their first six years of life is going to determine what their health is going to be, what their mental health is going to be, what their physical health, what their emotional health, what their cognitive health is going to be. And there are people far more qualified than I to talk about that. But the other area I'd like to really drill in on is making it possible for children in their early years to be educated and integrated racially and socioeconomically integrated settings. Because these are the years in which children develop their attitudes about other people. Their attitudes are being formed about social interaction, the ability to see others as respected humans, the ability to be a part of communities that are not only filled with people who look like them, but people who don't. And if we can begin to develop those social networks early on, then I think we set the stage not only for healthy bodies, but healthy minds and healthy social interaction as well. I have one word to say to that Dana, are you ready? I'm ready. Wow. Thank you. So with those two little conversations as a larger context for learning and for life, I want to come back to my friend Elaine, who apparently is more than a wife, mom, grandma and teacher. She is a joy giver, a promoter of right hearts and attitudes and social networking for pizza. I thought she was just a teacher and just a teacher is the understatement of the year. So tell me one more time Elaine, what it is you want for the children you teach? That they feel loved, that they feel secure, that they feel that I am there for them, that things aren't going to change from day to day, that my consequences are still my consequences where out in the world they don't know. And for loads of kids today, sometimes the classroom is the most stable part of their life. So when you say I want my kids to be able to count on that my classroom is a place of joy, that's a pretty profound statement on the one hand, but weighty on the other. You feel the weight of that, obviously. I do. I really feel that they come in with so much baggage, if you will. There's so many troubled families and situations and with all the news and the media of what's going on in schools, that's so scary. We have to be so prepared to deal with everything. We have tornado drills, we have fire drills, we have lockdown drills, we have lock out drills, we have drills for just about everything so that they feel safe, but yet practicing those makes them scared out of their wits. So I have to, as we're practicing all these drills, make sure that we're calm and it's because we're going to be safe and we're going to not let things hurt us. That's why we're doing this and so the fight is different in that way, is that we're trying to stay calm and so you're trying to stay calm in a crazy world, if you will, and it isn't just the world, it's their world, right, every little universe represented by an eight-year old or a seven-year-old or whatever, is interesting because when I talk to your boy, he said one of the biggest things that has helped him is his capacity to prepare and he talked about his dad being a builder because I brought your husband up as a builder who loves design and preparation. There's a sense in which you and your husband are alike in that regard is that the amount of preparation that it takes to build a house or build a person is not either inconsequential or very different from each other, is it? That's very true now that you mention it. I just thought of that, that's amazing, I just thought of that. Because not only we're planning our drills and our safety but we're planning our lessons that we actually have to teach in the middle of all of this, yeah, we have curriculum to follow and our curriculum has expanded so we're teaching anti-bullying curriculum, we're teaching character ed, we're teaching all these other aspects, it's not just math and science and social studies which I love to teach. So it isn't reading writing, reading writing arithmetic, now it's reading writing arithmetic plus anti-bullying. And just survival in the real world, yeah, within a classroom, their real world. Wow. If you were to go back in your career in your life and change one thing or say, I wish I could do that again or do that particular piece in a different way. Is there something, anything that comes to mind and you don't have to have an answer to this? The only thing that really comes to mind is I loved having my kids at home and I was always sad when school started and so fall school starting as a teacher is never, as always more of a sad time when I think, oh, I had to send my kids back because I loved being with them all day during the summer. So maybe I would, if I could change something, I'd hang on to them a little bit longer, hang on to my own kids and that's not very much about all the other kids out there, but I love all the kids I've worked with. I have a friend who said that when her boys graduated high school, she felt like she was out of a job and there's a little sense of that. So I've talked to your son, I've talked to your daughter-in-law and each of them has talked about a faith part of their life. When you look at your life and how faith plays into what you do or how you think about what you do, talk to me about that. Well I think prayer is a big part of it. I know that prayer is the way I got through multiple deployments and prayer is how I handle my classroom. I pray for every child in my classroom the summer before and then each day as I learn more about them. But during the summer before I would pray for each of the children in my classroom and praying over my family every morning when I first wake up and just having that faith that the Lord, I couldn't be there with Kirk for example when he was deployed. I couldn't be there but I knew the Lord was there and I love him a whole lot but the Lord loved him even more, even more than I could ever possibly love him. So I just had to turn him over, each one of my kids over in my kids' spouses and now all these little grandkids and then my classroom as well. But there are things I didn't know how to respond to and how to work with. So praying over my classroom every morning before I walked in there or during the day when I was in there and playing praise music for them as their calm music. I had some instrumental praise music just having that faith that just subtle ways in the classroom that their needs and this isn't a religious or provile school, it's a public school. Instruments are neutral, right? In that sense, I think if I'm hearing correctly and then we'll wrap this up, if I'm hearing correctly in the fight for freedom, whether it's a physical fight for freedom on battlefields far and wide, or whether it's the intellectual, emotional, spiritual fights for freedom in a classroom or in a home of someone who's deployed, the two things that have popped up, as I've listened, are that the weapons in the fight are faith and faith operationalized. I don't know if that's a word. Good word. This is found in prayer. My friend Lloyd Ogowy, who was chaplain of the United States Senate for eight years, he said to the prayer that God always answers, center center is when one just calls out, God help me. He always responds for that. And I just find it a great honor to sit with a family, at least three members of a family, who find themselves in the good fight, in a good battle for things that are true and right, and just to sense how you handle that, because life is a journey, but it's also a fight, and to be able to say at the end of the day, we'll call the Apostle, I've fought the good fight. I think that's a, that's not a bad thing to have on one's tombstone or in one's heart. I have fought the good fight. Mama, thanks for talking to me. You're welcome. I have to tell you, when I speak with someone like Elaine Foster and educators like we've heard, I'm inspired. I'm so grateful for the teachers in our communities, in our land, who have sacrificed to fight to teach, so that they can help children, little ones, medium ones and big ones, learn to fight to learn. There is something about bringing joy, because you unlock people's doors or give them places to stand, so they can experience life and God's grace and friendships and the joy of walking through life with heads held high, it's just a profound thing. So one more time, life may be a journey, but it's also a fight. And I pray for you who are listening, that for your families, for the little people and the medium people and the big people who are in classrooms across these United States, that they would have teachers who bring joy, because that's an end game. God bless you, catch you next week, when we'll hopefully have more stories to make sense of it all.